WOOF! Newsletter

December 12, 2018

How to Protect Everyone's Office 365 Email Accounts—With One Device

Cybercriminals attack Office 365 email servers constantly. While Microsoft's internal security is good, it's not perfect. Your email can become vulnerable. Unless you use a third-party device to "detour" those cyberattacks before they reach your email.

For the last WOOF of 2018, we return to the topic of email security. Next to Internet access, email is the most critical system in any business to protect.

Cybercriminals use it to steal data by the gigabyte, or hold your company hostage with ransomware. The battle to protect email from them never ends.

Many businesses opt to let Microsoft fight that battle for them. They subscribe to Office 365 for email, and go about their day.

While Office 365 is a strong and productive email system...it suffers from a serious security issue. One that Microsoft hasn’t fixed. But you can fix it, for all your email accounts, with one device.

That's what we're talking about in today's WOOF.

Isn't Office 365 Secure Already?

Microsoft designed Office 365 for productivity. It works well in this regard. It's also intended to keep email secure. However, this is where O365 can stumble.

O365 does have Advanced Email Threat Protection available with most plans (details here). But it's an add-on you have to pay for; it's not enabled by default.

Even with the advanced protection, O365 email suffers from a structural security risk. A risk cybercriminals keep targeting.

Office 365's Structural Vulnerability: It's a Self-Contained System

O365 routes emails within its own cloud system. From email server direct to email server. Along the way, O365 scans emails to check for spam, malware, & phishing.

It uses its own set of policies & controls to police the emails. Cybersecurity experts call this "internal scanning." If we were to chart the steps, they would look like this:

O365 Server → O365 Scans → O365 Server

The problem? This system is self-contained. It uses the same process every time, taking the same routes, applying the same policies at the same stages.

It's possible to code malware to bypass those policies. If you know what one system does, you can avoid it. The types of cyberattacks keep changing to exploit this. Examples:

BRUTE FORCE—Pinging one email server with millions of requests until it crashes, letting the cybercriminal exploit the security hole this creates.

This forces both internal and external scanning into the system. Each & every email must endure extra scrutiny, long before it hits your inbox. Creating a higher degree of security, by increasing the number of times spam or malware gets caught.

This is what modusCloud does. It's a cloud-based device that provides real-time threat protection again spam, phishing emails, and malware. modusCloud acts like a castle wall and a trapdoor at the same time.

If a cybercriminal attacks your Office 365 accounts, they have to go through modusCloud to reach your email server. Since modusCloud uses different filters (more stringent than Microsoft's), they didn't prepare for those. Only the O365 self-contained internal scanners.

As a result, their attempts get stuck. Your email stays nice and secure…in fact, you'd never know anything happened!

Bonus: You can add modusCloud protections to your O365 email accounts for almost the same price as Microsoft's Advanced Email Threat Protection. Same price, but much more vigilant email protection.